However, this mitigation obligation suffers from considerable vagueness, as there are reasonable differences of opinion on how best to enhance the legitimacy of the existing international legal order. As a remedy, Dworkin invokes a second fundamental obligation of states, the principle of salienence: international jurists, for their part, have opened up to empirical, sociological and political approaches in order to understand how norms arise and how actors exercise normative authority. This goes beyond the exclusive understanding of international law as a coherent legal system with recognized sources of law and specific techniques of legal practice. International lawyers are increasingly adopting a more pluralistic and holistic view, understanding international law as a social process. This social process leads to normative regulations that act as standards of conduct to guide and evaluate the behavior of international actors. The fact that the individual has achieved such an important role in international law as a central subject beyond the borders of States is truly remarkable. Today, every individual has rights that permeate the international and are fundamentally enshrined in a global, albeit imperfect, law that permeates every one of our lives. This law is not static, but is constantly evolving. It must be made effective, challenged, defended and reformulated in order to realize its emancipatory potential.
But Hart rejected the possibility that consent or pacta sunt servanda can fulfill such a function: saying that “international law is what states have accepted” or “international obligations must be fulfilled” cannot be a rule of recognition. Second, there are normative questions about the legitimate objectives that international law – or its areas such as international human rights law, international environmental law and international criminal law – should promote and the means by which it can do so appropriately, and, in this context, how to assess the legitimacy of international law. A recurring question is to what extent ethical and political norms for assessing national law – such as democracy, the rule of law, and even legitimacy itself – apply to international law (an important theme in Buchanan`s work, for example, Buchanan 2013). Because of the long period of philosophical neglect of international law, we are still at an early stage in the formation of an adequate image of political morality adapted to its particular nature and role. These issues are mainly addressed in sections 4, 5 and 6 of this article. These normative concerns become more acute in the case of a full-fledged world government. Kant came to a famous and sobering conclusion in Perpetual Peace about the prospect that international organizations could evolve into such a world government: as Crawford shows, existing international law generally struggles to accommodate each of these wishes; at best, only certain “enclaves” of international law can do so (Crawford 2014:367). Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender/transgender (LGBT) law theory is a critical school of thinking that evolves as gaps in international law regarding the integration of queer theory into international law theory are recognized. While human rights conventions have recently begun to become mainstream in terms of equality and its addressees, in the past all discussions on sexual orientation and gender identity have remained largely intact.
The LGBT International Law Theory movement focuses on inclusion and awareness of LGBT rights (and the protection of individuals) as well as the integration of queer theory into the field of international law. Some approaches focus on the issue of compliance: why do states follow international standards when there is no coercive power to ensure compliance? Other approaches focus on the problem of international rule-making: why do states voluntarily adopt international legal norms that restrict their freedom of action in the absence of global legislation. Other perspectives are policy-oriented; They develop theoretical frameworks and instruments to criticize existing rules and make suggestions for improving them. Some of these approaches are based on national legal theory, others are interdisciplinary, while others have been developed specifically to analyze international law. But assuming that a right to govern is a claim presumably attributable to international law and international institutions, how can we determine whether it is ever justified? The issue is exacerbated by the fact that, in recent decades, international law has increasingly imposed a broader right of sovereignty, encroaching on areas previously considered to be the power of the State, including the fundamental rights of its own citizens, economic and environmental policies, and the provision of vital goods such as education and health care.
